The subject matter discussed in the background section should not be assumed to be prior art merely as a result of its mention in the background section. Similarly, a problem mentioned in the background section or associated with the subject matter of the background section should not be assumed to have been previously recognized in the prior art. The subject matter in the background section merely represents different approaches, which in and of themselves may also be inventions.
A database can store digital objects or records for each person or organization that may be able to help in achieving a goal. Each record can consist of a few standard fields, such as first name, last name, company name, job title, address, telephone number, e-mail address, fax number, and mobile phone number. For performant matching of a record against a large database of records, the database records need to be indexed. A database system can use indices to quickly identify match candidates for the record to be matched, which may be referred to as a suspect record or a prospect record. The design of match keys takes recall and performance into consideration. Recall is the percentage of actual matching records that are identified by a database system. To achieve the ideal of 100% recall, a database system may need to treat every record in the database as a candidate for every suspect, which typically is not feasible, performance-wise. At the other extreme of the recall/performance spectrum, a database system can quickly search records by using narrowly focused match keys, but narrowly focused match keys may fail to identify some matching records.